My diary tells how things began. At 9:00 A.M. on 18 January 1984, I arrived at the home of Leonard Arrington, director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute of Church History and, more to the point, my supervisor. He had telephoned the day before and asked that I come by. As I entered his living room, Leonard showed me rather matter-of-factly a copy of a recently found document, which I found unsettling. “At face value,” I wrote that evening in my journal, “it is explosive. It is a letter from Martin Harris to W. W. Phelps, [written in] 1830, describing the early origins of the Church in spiritualistic and cabalistic terms. It confirms several other documents that have been recently found, indicating the ‘treasure-hunting’ activity of Joseph Smith prior to the organization of the Church. These ‘finds,’” I wrote, will require a re-examination and rewriting of our origins.”
During my interview, I learned that Steven F. Christensen, a Salt Lake City businessman, had quietly purchased the letter and was now asking for my help to prepare the document for publication. Accordingly, I later met with Steve and discussed the project with him. Then after thinking the matter over for a day or two, I told him I would take part in the project. Eventually, Dean Jessee, my Smith Institute colleague, and Brent Metcalfe, then an employee of Mr. Christensen, joined in the initial stages of research.
Thus began my intellectual and spiritual journey with Joseph Smith, the Palmyra Seer. Of course, I had known him before. He had been woven in the warp and woof of my Cedar Rapids, Iowa, childhood, when Sunday School lessons and “testimonies” in our small branch declared his ministry. Later while serving a Southern States mission, I had acquired my own fervor, which my subsequent church service matured and increased. But never previously had I scrutinized the Prophet. I had never submitted him to that careful, microscopic autopsy that historians must practice on their subjects. While first holding the Harris letter in my hands in Mr. Christensen’s office, I sensed such a detailed study would be required. If the letter were authentic, I believed it would require all the old Joseph Smith sources to be re-read. New sources, I thought, should be searched for. Perhaps innovative methods of analysis would be required.
My journey with Joseph has now taken two years. Perhaps it is time to pause and search for meanings and suggest possible new directions. Were my first excited feelings about historical revisionism justified? How do some of our recently found or refound sources fit into the larger body of evidence, and what are some of their implications? Needless to say, answers to these ambitious questions will be partial and tentative, and I offer nothing here but a private view.
At the outset I admit our task has not been easy. At first, there were angry and sometimes petulant letters and phone calls that severely reminded me of my human frailty. Well-meaning friends and relatives conveyed a similar message. Tragedy overtook our work when a series of Salt Lake City bombings injured one and killed two others, including Mr. Christensen himself. According to the initial theorizing of local law enforcement and public media sources, these murders were believed connected to the now celebrated Martin Harris letter. Through all this, I confess to having deeply troubled feelings. Added to the tragic loss of a friend, there was the need to ask hard questions of my personal faith. The Martin Harris letter and its companion piece, Joseph Smith’s 1825 letter to Josiah Stowell, speak of a strange world of guardian spirits, magical hazel rods, thrice-occurring dreams, seer stones, and even a white salamander. This is not stereotypical fare of an average Salt Lake City testimony meeting.
The letters have stirred excited comment. Some have asked if we have at last the key for understanding Joseph Smith. Will Christian magic and the occult unravel the man who has been described as an “enigma wrapped within an enigma” and who claimed shortly before his death that “no man knows my history”? Some privately have gone further. They speak of the old intellectual moorings of Mormonism being adrift. Are not the new findings, they ask, the opposite of our old way of understanding Mormon things?
While pursuing my study, I have reminded myself that religious truths do not change. Our interpretation of them may change. Or our understanding of how they have been wrought in time and space may change. But truth is a constant, and my faith is that Mormonism is its repository. However, my caution regarding the documents springs from something more than personal belief. In matters like this, there is always a second step. As quieter perspectives inevitably settle in, the breathless “antithesis” gives way to a more sedate “synthesis.” During this second phase, what once seemed so revolutionary is reconciled and merged with still valid legacies of the past. To illustrate, our understanding of Joseph Smith’s encounters with Moroni will not be insightful if we focus narrowly on Martin Harris’s “trickster spirit” and forget the several contemporaneous statements, including Harris’s own, that speak of Cumorah’s “angel.” These apparent conflicts must be weighed, somehow harmonized, and molded into a new, more complex understanding.
Because of new documents and similarly minded sources which our traditional histories have ignored, we shall eventually draw a new portrait of Joseph and his work. Such a view will doubtless preserve the integrity of Mormonism. It will draw insights from both untraditional and traditional sources. And the result will be fresh. Those who assert that we do not need to rethink some elements of our past are wrong. Equally true, those who claim that the new documents bring intellectual chaos and require radical changes are also certainly mistaken. We need to pursue the commonsense middle ground.
While it is too early to suggest precisely what the new Joseph Smith synthesis will be, there are four dimensions or insights that seem compelling. First, Mormon scholarship will come to terms with the folk culture of the time. The question before scholars is no longer if Joseph and his family participated in the cunning arts, but the degree and meaning of their activity. Richard Bushman’s fine new survey of the period, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, has already tacitly made this point. But if the “new” documents prove to be authentic, they will probably take us further than even Bushman’s study suggests. The Joseph Smith letter to Josiah Stowell places the Smith family in the money-digging business—and this in the words and handwriting of Joseph Smith himself. The Martin Harris letter in turn, is as suggestive. Harris places the founding events of Mormonism in a folk-religious context and claims Joseph Smith as his source.
However, the question of whether the Smith family participated in money digging and magic does not rely on the recently found letters. The weight of evidence, with or without them, falls on the affirmative side of the question. For instance, we have the Hurlbut–Howe affidavits, which since 1834 have asserted that the Smiths were involved with money digging.1 The same story also emerges from other eyewitness, including the less negatively biased interviews gathered by RLDS churchman William H. Kelley.2 Nor are these collections our only affidavits. The anti-Mormon and non-Mormon witnesses represent too many viewpoints and their accounts were given in too many circumstances to be dismissed merely as trumped-up misrepresentations designed to discredit Joseph Smith and Mormonism.
Certain pieces of evidence are especially telling. There is, for example. “Uncle” Jesse Smith’s acrid-spirited 1829 letter to Hyrum Smith. The letter suggests that Joseph, Sr., possessed a magical rod, left “the land of Vermont” to pursue “golden gods,” and, most significantly, practiced “necromancy.” Chapter VII of the Book of Commandments, in turn, promises Oliver Cowdery a revelatory “rod of nature,” perhaps similar to the Vermont divining rods that once may have attracted his father, William. Joseph Knight, one of the Church’s first converts, told a stylized story of Mormon origins similar in spirit and often similar in detail to Martin Harris’s letter. Finally there are the statements of the Smiths themselves. Lucy Mack Smith’s honest narrative insists that the family never halted their grinding labor simply to “win the faculty of Abrac,” draw “magic circles[,] or [pursue] sooth saying.” Lucy claimed the Smiths “never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation.” The father did more than hint about the family’s interest in magical arts. At young Joseph’s 1826 money-digging trial, Joseph, Sr., insisted that “both he and his son were mortified that this wonderful power which God has so miraculously given . . . [Joseph, Jr.] should be used only in search of filthy lucre, or its equivalent in earthly treasures.”3
Of course, we will not learn too much about Joseph by merely documenting his money digging or by treating it as an epithet. That was the mistake of several post–World War II scholars. Fawn M. Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, for instance, produced a portrait of many hues, but her “Joseph Smith” was ultimately a caricature. One of Brodie’s troubles was that she did not try to understand the culture from which Joseph and the early Mormon converts came, a failing, unhappily, that several of her Mormon detractors shared. As a result, she saw the Smiths as a neighborhood “peculiarity” and transformed their religious fervor and folk customs into chicanery and fraud. In her interpretation, Joseph became a skilled confidence man who stumbled onto religion.
This brings us to the second meaning of our current search to understand Mormon origins. Contrary to Brodie’s view, our untraditional money-digging documents help to reveal that Joseph and his early converts were part of a broad but now virtually defunct culture whose meaning is basic to our process of historical reconstruction. With the importance of this culture in mind, I wrote “The Persisting Idea of American Treasure Hunting,” the preceding paper in this issue of BYU Studies. In my research, I found that during the lifetime of Joseph Smith an ancient set of beliefs coexisted with the rising tide of Enlightenment culture. The old Weltanschauung accepted the reality of digging for buried treasure, but its cultural tentacles were actually far more extensive. Some of its believers practiced alchemy, astrology, herbalism, or even “white magic,” which its adepts or seers claimed to be a beneficent storehouse of humankind’s proven nostrums. Others claimed to be preserving the higher and mystical biblical truth, especially those drawn from the Old Testament, that the established religions had abandoned or ignored. The wide-range interests of these seers and the degree to which they addressed the everyday needs and concern of the folk actually made them, in some periods (for example, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England), nearly as numerous and influential as the established clergy. There were scores of these men and women (often they were boys and girls) still quietly practicing their arts in America when Joseph Smith was born.
The role of this culture in America should not be exaggerated. While some influential early Americans, such as John Wentworth, Jr., were attracted to it, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Enlightenment rationalism dominated most educated circles. Thus by Joseph Smith’s time, the old ways persisted largely as a people’s movement, often in a cultural backwaters like New England’s hill country, German Pennsylvania, or the emerging frontier areas of the Old Northwest.
Did this culture influence young Joseph? While a rigorous weighing of evidence is yet to be undertaken, there are abundant clues that it did. Besides the magic and money-digging sources already cited, neighbors often recalled the boy’s spiritualistic activity. He blessed crops, found lost articles, predicted future events or prophesied—the classic labor of an Old Testament–oriented village seer. Moreover, by using divining rods and seer stones, he employed the adepts’ common techniques.4 If the several accounts of his 1826 trial can be trusted, Joseph himself admitted as much. “He has occasionally been in the habit of looking through his stone to find lost property for 3 years,” one report has him saying, “but of late had pretty much given it up on account of injuring his Health, especially his eyes.”5
Undoubtedly, the Smith’s New York penury exacted relentless labor and prevented the wholesale money digging that some Palmyra neighbors later charged young Joseph with. But on occasion, the spiritually gifted boy apparently followed the enthusiasm of his father and searched for treasure. Even more likely, he sought lost articles and perhaps foretold the future. And when the young Prophet proclaimed his Restoration mission, they were many believers who came from this same culture. Early converts such as Jared Carter, Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, Hiram Page, and the Whitmers possibly saw Joseph as acting within the tradition of a village wise man or seer. When he set aside the informal, unstructured, charismatic, and visionary religion of the early 1830s for his larger, worldwide mission, these men left the Church in disappointment.
Elements of Joseph Smith’s boyhood culture, then, explain a great deal. We now understand the context and content of many sources that traditional LDS scholars have previously dismissed out of hand. As a result, the process of synthesizing Mormon and non-Mormon materials can proceed at a quickened pace. In addition, we see that the Smiths were not the idiosyncratic folks many neighbors and later historians have claimed. An understanding of the culture also helps us to decipher early nineteenth-century conversion and apostasy patterns. None of this should be too surprising. As R. Laurence Moore has observed, “No historical belief or activity can be wholly deviant with respect to the age in which it appeared. Everything, after all, is a product of its cultural milieu and, therefore, has some more or less normal meaning within the culture.”6 The growth and early success of Mormonism provide prima facie evidence that the movement was not the aberration some have suggested.
The third insight of our study has already been suggested. The documents that have emerged in recent years provide a context for harmonizing many of the seemingly ill-fitting facts of Joseph’s early religious life. From Abner Cole to Fawn Brodie to several recent authors, historians have struggled with the apparent paradox of the Smiths’ unquestioned religious feeling and their money digging. Mormon believers, in turn, have asked themselves how Joseph’s youthful epiphanies can be reconciled with his Palmyra search for lost articles or his scouring the Susquehanna River headwaters for salt, silver, and other valuables.
If authentic, the Martin Harris letter suggests that some of these difficulties are the result of imposing modern values on the past. Certainly Harris and other early converts found no incongruity between religion and scrying. The latter was often overlaid with religiosity. Prayers, fasting, and acts of Old Testament sacrifice often accompanied the search for buried wealth. Joseph himself reportedly employed devotional rituals when searching for wealth and led a digging company that claimed the treasure could not be unearthed “except by faith.”7 Elsewhere, as with Vermont’s celebrated “Wood-scrape” incident or in a Wayne County, New York, congregation, treasure hunting, the use of divining rods or seer stones, and formal religious worship were interrelated.8
Martin Harris personified this mixture of religion and the old culture. By his own account, prior to accepting Joseph Smith’s religious mission he was “taught of the Spirit” in 1818 to reject Trinitarian creeds and consequently became a seeker.9 Neighbors recalled his attraction to a series of churches, though he apparently failed to affiliate with any, and the great extent of his Bible reading and memorization.10 Yet, despite these rather traditional religious interests, there is evidence that Harris understood and accepted the prevailing money-digging lore, ascribed sacred significance to at least one of the Palmyra neighborhood digs, and may have dug for treasure himself at sites that included Cumorah, or “Mormon Hill.”11
The 1830 letter purportedly written by Martin Harris to W. W. Phelps may show how these interests merged. While as early as 1829 Martin Harris told the story of Joseph Smith’s recovery of the gold plates in terms more familiar to us,12 when writing to Phelps he chose to relate these same events in the people’s lore and idiom. Oracular dreams, seeric divination, or the ratifying or sanctifying of the events by three-fold repetition—certainly biblical as well as common money-digging themes—were merged with such esoteric ideas from the old culture as enchanted treasure, guardian spirits, and taunting salamanders. Clearly, in Martin Harris’s mind, there was no dichotomy between religion, as we now define it, and elements of his inherited culture.
While current evidence is impressionistic, it is likely that many other first-generation Mormons similarly failed to distinguish carefully between their personal culture and the divine voice. In addition to those already suggested, such converts as Alva Beaman, Joseph Knight, Orrin P. Rockwell, and Brigham Young probably knew and approved of Joseph’s earlier activity. As suggested previously, some of these men were predisposed to follow him because he first appeared in the familiar folk role of village seer. But they also believed that Providence had given Joseph a special role. “The gift of seeing was a natural gift,” President Brigham Young later taught. “There are thousands in the world who are natural born Seers, but when the Lord selected Joseph Smith to be his vice-regent and mouthpiece upon the earth in this dispensation, he saw that he would be faithful and honor his calling.”13
As with any people at any moment of time, the first Latter-day Saints (including Joseph Smith himself) required some time and effort to separate religious truth from their own sincerely held, culture-derived ideas, some of which today appear unfounded or irrational. “It may be admitted that some of . . . [the Prophet’s ancestors] believed in fortune telling, in warlocks and witches,” Elder B. H. Roberts observed. “To have been incredulous in such matters in that age and locality, would have stamped them [as being] abnormal.”14 But in addition to the folk elements, there were from the beginning transcendental religious moments, which men like Hiram Page found irrefutable. Page, who used a seer stone and may have dug for money, left organized Mormonism but could not forget the past. In 1847, Hiram Page wrote:
To say that a man of Joseph’s ability, who at that time did not know how to pronounce the word, Nephi, could write a book of six hundred pages, as correct as the book of Mormon, without supernatural power, and to say that those holy Angels who came and showed themselves to me as I was walking through the field, to confirm me in the work of the Lord of the last days—three of whom came to me afterwards and sang an hymn in their own pure language [would be an injustice]; yea, it would be treating the God of heaven with contempt, to deny these testimonies, with many others to mention here.15
While the personal and the divine clearly mixed in the lives of early Mormon converts, they nevertheless believed the heavenly voice was unmistakable.
A fourth dimension of our study involves the historical setting of early Mormonism. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, upstate New York was, to borrow Carl Carmer’s phrase, “a broad psychic highway, a thoroughfare of the occult.”16 Rachel Baker amazed neighbors by preaching in her sleep. Jemima Wilkinson announced herself as the reincarnated “Public Universal Friend.” The rappings of the Fox sisters, whose home was less than thirty miles from Palmyra, provided the impetus for American spiritualism. The area was known for its “isms.”
The causes of this frantic activity were complex, but one factor may help to explain the conditions surrounding early Mormonism. Upstate New York society was young and its people were uprooted.17 While some settlers were German, most came from New England and particularly from flint-hard Vermont. Like the Smith family, many of these emigrants entered New York totally dispossessed of former possessions, status, and even respectability. Perhaps still more difficult, many carried with them old folk culture that “modern” New Yorkers ridiculed and rejected. According to recent sociological analysis, during such painful moments of social and psychological dislocation people become more receptive to supernatural experience and to new religion. They seek assurance and solace, not in the old religions which their personal alienation rejects, but in fresh psychic and religious experiences. They seek a new, satisfying, and visionary faith.18
What I am proposing is not so much an argument as an hypothesis, and I am aware that some pieces do not fit smoothly together (Martin Harris, described by several of his neighbors as being religious, honest, but also given to a belief in phantoms and the supernatural, was a prosperous second-generation New Yorker). Yet there is enough truth in my model to suggest yet another reason why occult themes and activities surrounded Mormonism’s birth. These phenomena were part of a natural process that accompanies the beginning of any great religious tradition. If Carl Jung had been aware of early Mormonism’s money-digging motifs, he surely would have celebrated them as inevitable religious archetypes—the kind that have repeatedly emerged from men’s souls at moments of “great religious crisis” and preparatory to the coming of prophets and reformers.19 For those who are uncomfortable with Jung’s peculiar psychological formulations, there is a plentitude of historical examples. In periods of distress and disorientation, supernatural phenomena and the rise of new religions have repeatedly joined hands, whether (just to select few examples) at time of Augustus and Jesus, during English Interregnum, in Third World society after the Second World War, or, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, during our present era of supposed sophistication.20 My comments probably require a caution. There will be those who will mistake my suggestion as historical or psychological determinism or as an attempt to reshape Mormonism into “just another religion.” It is true that Joseph Smith found himself at an ideal time and place to proclaim a new faith. Further, the factors working on him (and within him) were similar to those of other religious reformers. But these facts need not be given a secular interpretation. Believing Mormons will see Joseph’s environment as providential. They will remain unbothered by yet another confirmation that God often proceeds naturally within the natural order. The conditions were ripe for the Restoration, and Joseph was ripe to lead out.
I began by speaking of a personal journey with Joseph Smith and of the need for a new understanding or synthesis of his work. When I started my study, Joseph seemed remote, undimensional, enigmatic, and, most perplexing, without the growth and tension that usually accompany religious wonder and seeking. That unfortunate and too common view is a legacy of our hagiographic tradition, which insists that Joseph sprang full grown while still a youth. I now see him differently. I see a spiritually gifted boy, born and reared within a culture that valued and nurtured such things. I see a youthful Joseph whose foibles were balanced by his religious striving and who, contrary to his historical detractors, was unsullied by any pattern of calculating deceit. Coming to understand his divine call (certainly the topic of another paper), he set aside or minimized those portions of his cultural inheritance that conflicted with his work. “I had seen a vision,” said Joseph; “I knew it, and I knew that God knew it,” and this knowledge gave him the confidence to engage in godly work.21 Finally, there are Joseph’s unusual contrasts. Early contemporaries saw him as rough-hewn, and from our perspective his early life and some of his attitudes were certainly shaped by his impoverished and untutored condition. Yet this same lad produced such complex and other-worldly texts as the Vision of Moses and especially the Book of Mormon. His greatest contrast, however, lay in his personal growth. With Providence’s intervention, he transformed himself from “Joseph, the Palmyra Seer,” who likely understood his early religious experience in one way, to the mature “Joseph, the Mormon Prophet” who saw them in quite a different light.
Latter-day Saints are not the only people with money-digging stories, and I wish to conclude with one from Jewish lore. Martin Buber’s Khassidischen Bucher contains a tale of Rabbi Eisik of Cracow, who set out on a journey of his own. This pious rabbi had dreamed three times of treasure buried beneath a Czechoslovakian bridge. Hastening to Prague, Rabbi Eisik found his bridge, but sentinels were posted day and night. Seeking his opportunity, the rabbi loitered nearby. Finally he was questioned by the captain of the guard, who forced from him a confession. “Really, poor man,” said he, “have you worn out your shoes coming all this way simply because of dream?” But, strangely, the guard also had had a dream. His told of great wealth buried behind a stove in the house of Eisik, a Cracow rabbi. But the captain, being a “rational” man, placed no stock in it. Without revealing his identity, our Polish rabbi excused himself and returned home to unearth the treasure that ended his poverty.22
There certainly is parable here. We have spoken about our changing view of Joseph Smith’s youth. We have talked about his money digging, the Smiths’ folk culture that was so different from our own, Joseph’s mixing of personal and divine concepts within the context of his religious experience, and the historical and psychological setting that makes the Latter-day prophet’s youth understandable. Confronted by such fare and by the unusual documents that prompted it, and lacking the suppleness and poetic insight that the interpretation of religious experience requires, some may contemplate their own distant journey—a journey that will take them from their spiritual hearth. In time, they may come to realize that, after all, their treasure lay buried in a familiar, dusty corner behind the stove.
